If your target market is everyone, then you’ll target no one. I’m not sure who said that originally, but it might be the simplest, most helpful advice for any marketer. Apparently BlackBerry continues to feel it is the exception to the rule, despite past failures trying to be everything to everyone.
Let’s run down what BlackBerry announced yesterday at BlackBerry Live:
- The BlackBerry Q5, a QWERTY BlackBerry 10 handset that is slated for emerging markets.
- The BlackBerry 10.1 upgrade that will allow, among other things, BlackBerry Z10 users to run Skype.
- BBM Channels, which amounts to a BBM social network.
- Availability of BBM on iOS and Android, coming this summer.
The BlackBerry 10.1 upgrade is obviously all positive, if a little late. We’ve heard about this for a month or so now, so it’s good to hear BlackBerry finally planning to roll it out.
The Q5 continues BlackBerry’s strategy of creating mid- and low-tier devices for international markets. It’s not an awful one, to be sure. There are plenty of people around the globe who can’t afford top-tier smartphones, even including the best BlackBerry models (zing). At the same time, creating products for these markets takes away focus from the high-end US and EMEA markets.
Then we get to the BBM announcement. The new BBM Channels feature essentially turns BBM into a social network. You can now create, follow, and subscribe to channels, taking actions such as commenting and liking posts. The first examples BlackBerry touted were Merceds AMG Petronas Formula One Team. It’s pretty clear that they’re trying to work with brands here. As if we don’t get enough of that from Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and basically every other social network.
We’ve been hearing about the possibility of BBM on iOS and Android for a while now, maybe two years. They could have attempted this in the past, when BBM was still popular despite BlackBerry’s decline. But they held off on that until they had the Channels tie-in. At this point, though, iOS and Android users have fewer reasons than ever to use BBM. With so many high-quality instant messaging products on the market, BBM has become just another.
I feel that Nathaniel Mott of PandoDaily best sums up BlackBerry’s position:
BlackBerry is playing catch-up with Apple, Samsung, and Google, and seems to be struggling to reconcile that fact with its former glory. The company’s products no longer have a monopoly on the business elite’s pockets, are no longer representative of true innovations, and are, for all their advances, rooted in the smartphone market of the past.
The company needs to get better at communicating — or even figuring out — what its products are and who they are for before it can cast the perception that it’s left its prime aside.
In other words, they’re trying to be everything to everyone. In the process they’re doing little but standing still. Loyal BlackBerry users will always stand by the brand and even defend them — you learn this after writing about BlackBerry, for BlackBerry fans, for five years. If BlackBerry had decided, six years ago, to continue focusing on that core of users, we might not be having this discussion now. But starting in 2008 they tried to become everything to everyone.
It didn’t work then. Chances are it won’t work now.
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